Top 120 Joan D. Chittister Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.”

— Joan D. Chittister

52. “Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.”

— Joan D. Chittister

53. “Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges.”

— Joan D. Chittister

54. “There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying – which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.”

— Joan D. Chittister

55. “It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are – and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside...”

— Joan D. Chittister

56. “The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

57. “Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other.”

— Joan D. Chittister

58. “We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

— Joan D. Chittister

59. “The poet Mary Oliver may have written the best definition of what it means to be a prophet in contemporary spirituality. She writes, “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

60. “Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.”

— Joan D. Chittister

61. “We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn’t prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It’s what’s inside of us, not what’s outside of us that counts.”

— Joan D. Chittister

62. “If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.”

— Joan D. Chittister

63. “Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.”

— Joan D. Chittister

64. “It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.”

— Joan D. Chittister

65. “Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

66. “My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed.”

— Joan D. Chittister

67. “Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

68. “Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.”

— Joan D. Chittister

69. “To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.”

— Joan D. Chittister

70. “Two ideas militate against our consciously contributing to a better world. The idea that we can do everything or the conclusion that we can do nothing to make this globe a better place to live are both temptations of the most insidious form. One leads to arrogance; the other to despair.”

— Joan D. Chittister

71. “Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that’s in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.”

— Joan D. Chittister

72. “Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.”

— Joan D. Chittister

73. “We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again.”

— Joan D. Chittister

74. “Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.”

— Joan D. Chittister

75. “Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

76. “We don’t change as we get older – we just get to be more of what we’ve always been.”

— Joan D. Chittister

77. “In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.”

— Joan D. Chittister

78. “We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to everything. We confuse “stagnant” with “calm” and call it holiness. We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life.”

— Joan D. Chittister

79. “A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility – and the morality – of the church itself.”

— Joan D. Chittister

80. “The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”

— Joan D. Chittister

81. “We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.”

— Joan D. Chittister

82. “To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not “coming.” Heaven is here.”

— Joan D. Chittister

83. “The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.”

— Joan D. Chittister

84. “An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.”

— Joan D. Chittister

85. “Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.”

— Joan D. Chittister

86. “All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.”

— Joan D. Chittister

87. “But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us – and are not ours at the same time.”

— Joan D. Chittister

88. “Persistence may not solve everything – at least in our lifetime – but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.”

— Joan D. Chittister

89. “No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don’t get it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

90. “Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.”

— Joan D. Chittister

91. “Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.”

— Joan D. Chittister

92. “Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.”

— Joan D. Chittister

93. “We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

— Joan D. Chittister

94. “Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?”

— Joan D. Chittister

95. “As Albert Camus put it: “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

— Joan D. Chittister

96. “We should employ our passions in the service of life,” Sir Richard Steele wrote, “not spend life in the service of our passions.”

— Joan D. Chittister

97. “Bloom where you are planted,′ the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ′ plant yourself where you know you can bloom’ may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, “Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.”

— Joan D. Chittister

98. “Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.”

— Joan D. Chittister

99. “We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.”

— Joan D. Chittister

100. “To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young – to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care about those things anymore” – is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.”

— Joan D. Chittister